This brilliant and penetrating book uncovers a crisis in the political imagination, a wide-spread failure to provide the passionate sense of community in which our need for belonging can be met . Seeking the answers to fundamental questions, Michael Ignatieff writes vividly both about ideas and about the people who tried to live by them - from Augustine to Bosch, from Rousseau to Simone Weil. Incisive and moving, The Needs of Strangers return to philosophy to its proper place, as a guide to the art of being human.